Practical Technology

One of the reasons why Red Hat will be the first billion dollar open-source company is that the company has also looked beyond just Linux to what you can do with Linux on the cloud and thin-client desktops; Java Enterprise Edition and now, with the release of Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, big data. Big [...]

[Read more →]

There’s something about USB thumb drives that bring out the worst of tech. design. More >

[Read more →]

If you’ve been in the computer business for a while, you can painfully remember when serial RS-232 ports could barely handle 28Kbps (kilobytes per second). The RS-232 serial port standard was loose enough that you could have “compatible” devices that you could never, ever physically connect with each other. How things have changed! Now, USB [...]

[Read more →]

Over the last few years, the Universal Serial Bus (USB) has become the universal interface. Starting in 1995, when USB 1.0 could only transfer 12 Mbps (Megabits per second), the standard started up slowly. But when USB 2.0 came along in 2000, with its 480 Mbps, the days were numbered for PS/2, serial, parallel, and [...]

[Read more →]

It used to be so easy. They’d ask you, “Where’s my data?” And, you could point to the servers. Then along came multiple storage virtual storage layers, then Storage Area Networks (SAN)s and Network Attached Storage (NAS) and more recently the cloud. What’s a network administrator to do? Likewise Software has a plan. Likewise, which [...]

[Read more →]